It's been more than a month and a half since fire gutted a factory on Yale Cres., but Ruben Breez can't get the image out of his mind.

It's not only because the smoke woke him and his family up in the middle of the night on June 7. It's because he has had to look at the destruction from the view of his seventh-floor apartment every day since.

"To my right, I see housing -- a beautiful view. If I look straight ahead, I see the bridge -- another beautiful view," he said.

"But when I look to the left, I feel like I'm at Ground Zero."

Breez, a resident of Westdale Properties on Ida St., said he was disappointed efforts have not been made to clean up the property since the fire.

"It makes me feel angry and depressed," he said. "This is a living area. It's not supposed to be like this."

The fire caused about $500,000 damage to the building, the former Cunningham Foundry, said fire inspector Nathan Melin.

He said the fire was so great and produced so much smoke that the conventional procedure of dumping water on the roof failed to put it out, leading crews to tackle the blaze using heavy machinery, furthering the destruction.

"It's made the investigation impossible, so there is no investigation," he said.

Property owner Leo Coholic said he is getting his ducks in a row for the cleanup, which he estimates to begin in about a month.

The building had been empty for several years while Coholic attempted to find a tenant. More recently, he had been pursuing plans to use the site as a biodiesel facility before the fire occurred, a plan he said could have brought jobs to the area and put the derelict building to use.

"It's been pretty devastating," he said.

Since the fire, however, those plans have been put on the back burner, perhaps indefinitely. He said he is re-evaluating that option, worried about a repeat incident.

"Biodiesel and fire don't mix," he said.

Although there is no current investigation by the fire department, he is still hopeful the public could help him determine how the fire originated.

"If it was arson, then we must make sure that the arsonist is brought into custody to no longer be able to prey on St. Catharines buildings and potentially harm its citizenry, public services and economy," he wrote on his newly launched website www.21yale.ca.

Coholic asks anyone with information about how the fire may have sparked to e-mail contact@21yale.ca.